Before my first trip to Belarus as a fifteen-year-old, I, along with the rest of our team, went through extensive training on how to travel overseas. We learned behavioral differences between our country and others (Americans are loud), we learned how to properly and respectfully address the people we would meet, the rules for public transportation, and how to react to a plate of jello filled with sardines if it was placed before you.
Hint: Don’t make gagging noises and push it away. Act normal, swallow hard, and prepare for a culinary adventure.
By the time we left, we were fully ready to conquer the world, and for the most part we did a great job. There were a few instances, of course, when our American senses would overwhelm and we’d let out a shriek of excitement only to be met with the tsks of a nearby Babyshka. And really, no matter how hard you try, you couldn’t parade a group of 15-18 year old Americans down a Belorussian sidewalk in 1994 and not expect some sort of gawking.
Mostly, though, we handled ourselves well. Until that one day…
We made a stop in Frankfurt, Germany on our way home. It was a day and a night to decompress and explore. We grabbed our monstrous, rolling suitcases after making it through customs and in a long line, we made our way to the train that would take us to our hotel.
But there was a problem. We had to get down a long, very narrow escalator in order to get to the train. Perhaps, looking back, wisdom would have dictated that maybe we find an elevator that would better accommodate our bags, but we were running late, so we were instructed to turn our bags sideways and go down.
Only the first person in the group missed the instruction about turning the bag sideways.
He got to the bottom of the escalator and stepped off, but his bag did not budge. It was wedged tight. He yanked and pulled and in the meantime, the person behind him tried to step up and over his bag, only to lose her bag behind her in the process.
On and on it went with each of us trying to dive over the now growing pile of baggage, piling up like the players in a really bad, painfully humiliating rugby match. The ever moving escalator continued to propel everyone behind us downward, though some of the smart ones turned and fought the current to get back to the top.
It was the most hysterical mess as we all tumbled to the bottom, then slowly began to disentangle the unfortunate bags. We brushed ourselves off, held our heads high, and made our way to the train trying to communicate that we weren’t always this cool.
These last few days have felt like another ride on that fateful escalator. As one “bag” after another piled up at the bottom, I could see the mound approaching, and I hoped I could leap over it.
I tripped and fell yesterday. It all hit me. The stress of a job change, last minute flights to Arkansas that had to be changed into last minute flights to Houston for job interviews. Last day of school. Cancer diagnosis.All of life piled up before me, and instead of gracefully leaping over it, I fell miserably, a hyperventilating, panicked mess of a woman who thought she could hold it together.
It’s my fault, really. I forgot I’m pregnant, and that emotions when pregnant tend run a little…um…hotter than normal. I forgot to sleep, and I didn’t eat properly. I tried to do everything, and to be everyone to all my people. I wanted to be the strong one – the one who held it together.
Instead I’m the one who had a panic attack in the school parking lot.
I’m better today. It’s a new day, and releasing a lot of the pent up fears and heartache helped to dislodge the baggage waiting to trip me up. That’s the problem with keeping everything squelched up inside. It’s like trying to fit an oversized rolling bag on an undersized escalator.
It’s bound to cause a fall.
Are you feeling overwhelmed today? Is there a mound of life piling up before you? Before you try to jump over it, can I encourage you to call a friend, or meet with someone face to face who will let you unload some of the emotions?
Trust me – you will much prefer that to hyperventilating in a parking lot. I’m not always this cool, folks…
Here’s to a restful, balanced, baggage free weekend.
Last week I wrote of Love, and of the beautiful, mysterious pain that accompanies such a surrender of emotion. When I typed those words, I formed them in the context of watching my child graduate kindergarten. They were framed in the knowledge that Love requires separation, and in my innocent state of mind, I could only see the separation of parent and child that comes through space and time.
Then we got the phone call no one wants to receive.
There was a mass. The biopsy reveals cancer. We wait and we pray, and we hope for the best – the miracle of healing. Today the confirmation brought unwelcome news.
Stage 4. Metastatic.
Suddenly the pain of Love grew wings and took flight. Lee’s dad – our patriarch, our hero, our mentor, and a steady spiritual guide – now faces a fight that, short of a miraculous touch from God Himself, will result in his passing from this life on earth and into the gates of heaven.
“…Now it may surprise you to learn that in His (God’s) efforts to get permanent possession of a soul, He relies on the troughs even more than on the peaks;some of His special favorites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else.” C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
There is no irony in our present circumstance. We cannot point to these days with a flippant laugh and label them a coincidence. For on the very day we got news that cancer had invaded one we loved, Lee was in process to make a transition at work.
His division was cut loose from the company. We’d known this for weeks, and while the news was met with some disappointment, suddenly it seemed that he had lost his job for such a time as this.
Severance gives him a cushion to absorb the blow of his father’s illness. We have the freedom to leave, he and I, for the weekend, and fly to Arkansas where we will fold into the arms of his parents and brothers and all face this new challenge in the race together.
What a privilege it is…
When we told our kids of their grandfather’s illness, I felt a tightness pinch my heart. My sweet little ones will now taste the sting of illness. They can no longer be sheltered from the fear of grieving and, given the statistics, they may face the searing pain of death far earlier than I would have wanted them to.
And yet I cannot escape the thought that this journey we are about to walk as a family is a privilege. One thought has rumbled across my heart all day as I’ve processed this pain of a Love torn.
What a privilege it is for my children to know the sting of illness and the reality of heaven at a tender age.
We’re gearing up for a road filled with hope and unknowns. We cry out for a miracle, with full belief that God, in His mighty power, is capable of banishing the cancer from Herb’s body with a simple touch of His Hand. We pray for this, that we may show our children the power of God, and proclaim Him to the world.
And yet…
We accept the reality that God may have a different path planned. One in which we must say goodbye far sooner than we ever hoped or imagined or desired. And if this is the path we must follow, we will show our children the power of God, and we will proclaim Him to the world.
Cancer is an ugly word. It sucks the marrow of joy right out of a soul. But we have been given the grace of time. We pray it will be longer than the statistics predict. We pray it will be sweeter than the treatment’s effects. We rejoice in our current state of jobless unknowns, for it gives us the sweet freedom of time to process.
What a privilege it is to walk this road of grief and hope, for in this trough I feel God so near. He is real, a balm to the sting.
My ten year old and I took a walk today. Hand in hand we made our way down the sidewalk, and his sweet innocence blessed me.
“I’m excited to see heaven now,” he said to me, a smile spread across his face. “I can just imagine it, and what I’m imagining is awesome.”
What a privilege it is to walk this pain. We covet your prayers in the days, weeks, and months to come. They will be hard, and they will be sweet. They will mirror the mystery of Love.
Join us in praying for a miracle – no matter what shape it may take.
Humans are amphibians – half spirit and half animal.
As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation – the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks.
…Now it may surprise you to learn that in His (God’s) efforts to get permanent possession of a soul, He relies on the troughs even more than on the peaks;some of His special favorites have gone through longer and deeper troughs than anyone else.
The reason is this. To us (the demons) a human is primarily food; our aim is the absorption of its will into ours, the increase of our own area of selfhood at its expense. But the obedience that the Enemy (God) demands of men is quite a different thing.
One must face the fact that all the talk about His love for men, and His service being perfect freedom is not (as one would gladly believe) mere propaganda, but an appalling truth. He really does want to fill the universe with a lot of loathsome little replicas of Himself – creatures whose life, on its miniature scale, will be qualitatively like His own, not because He has absorbed them but because their wills freely conform to His.”
C.S. Lewis – The Screwtape Letters (emphasis mine)
Life can throw us curveballs when we least expect it. Sometimes we barely manage to push ourselves off our knees before we’re brought low again. We are undulating through life in the ever constant shift between highs and lows, goods and bads, troughs and peaks.
This is where our passions, our imaginations, and our eternal, spiritually connected souls take shape.
I’ve spent the morning digging through The Screwtape Letters once again. When life feels curvy, I find solace in books. My anxious heart calms in the rhythm of the written word. There is equal comfort to be found in music, which Lewis describes in The Screwtape Letters (from a demon’s point of view) as “a detestable art…a meaningless acceleration in the rhythm of celestial experience.”
“Something like it occurs in heaven,” he writes. Then he describes laughter as producing a similar effect on the human soul.
I don’t know where you are in life today, whether you’re down on your knees, trying to dust off yet another disappointment, or recoiling from the aftershocks of unexpected news, but I offer you this encouragement:
Look for comfort in beautifully penned words, and seek the peace of the scriptures.
Listen to music that pulls you into that realm of celestial experience.
And, if at all possible (and it’s always possible), find a way to laugh. Look for fun wherever you might find it, and for however brief a time it may appear, for as Lewis writes, “Fun is closely related to Joy – a sort of emotional froth arising from the play instinct.”
He woke early, the impending sunrise giving the morning sky just a hint of grey, a sign that life would soon rise and begin the daily dance. He moved through the motions of dressing, then made his way to the kitchen where the smell of coffee greeted him with gentle grace, pushing away some of the sleep that still lingered in his brain.
He wrapped his hands around the hot mug and waited for his brain to catch up to his body. Half a cup of coffee later, he felt ready. He walked to his desk, an old, worn block of wood that he’d sat at for over a decade now and he set the coffee cup down next to the shiny, black typewriter – his pride and joy.
He decided many years ago that his most serious thinking and writing would happen on this typewriter. The clacking of the keys produced a romanticism that spurred more thoughts, more ideas. He couldn’t replicate such creativity on a computer.
With the night sky still fighting against the rising sun, he hit the first key, then the second, until his fingers moved in a rhythm. His brain didn’t have time to question or worry about the intricacies of today’s writing. He simply let the ideas spill out, until the sun shone high, the dewy grass glimmered, and the final drop of coffee had long been drained away.
Only then could his day begin.
In college, I had a professor by the name of Dr. Tom Hanks. True story. He taught an entire class on Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. It was one of my favorite classes. It nearly did me in, as the whole purpose of the class was to read the book in the original Chaucerian language, memorize large portions of it, and write frequent papers on the different short stories.
But Dr. Hanks made the class fascinating for us all.
He was known to come into class dressed as Chaucer from time to time. When he read the stories to us, they came alive, as the inflection of his voice rose and fell with the beat of this strange language. I’ll never forget the day Dr. Hanks described to us the way he felt when he sat down to write.
“I write because I have to,” he told us one afternoon. “Writing for me is like brushing my teeth. I don’t always enjoy the process, but it is a necessity to get through my day.”
I don’t know if Dr. Hanks actually wrote on a black typewriter or not. I imagine that he did, because the idea of it befits the memory I have of this fascinating man. What I know with certainty, though, is Dr. Hanks ignited in me a passion for the written word unlike anyone I had ever known. He gave me a glimpse into the mind of someone who thrived on creativity.
He, along with one other teacher my senior year at Baylor, sent me away from college with the desire to create.
We all have a spark of creativity buried somewhere inside. Sometimes that spark manifests itself in words, sometimes in numbers. It can be showcased in the kitchen, bubbling over in hot meals, or piled high in decorative treats. The creativity can come out in rhythms and notes, or in the joy that comes from a deep conversation. Creativity can be seen in a painting, in a well decorated home, or in the joy that one finds in Do It Yourself projects.
There is a method to each of our creative minds. Some of us do our best work early in the morning, some prefer the dark quiet of the night. Some sit and let the ideas flow freely, others think and build until the ideas are ready to spill out.
Everyone is creative in some way, shape or form, and it’s that creativity that all comes together to form a world full of color, of innovation, and of beautiful, interesting life – a life designed by the ultimate Creator Himself. What a beautiful thing to behold.
Have you ever considered how you were wired creatively? When do you do your best work, and how do you keep your mind focused on the things that fuel the creative portion of your brain?
Benjamin Semenovich Shapolov grew up in Southern Ukraine, near Odessa. Raised in a family of Bible-believing Christians, Benjamin’s story is unique and awe-inspiring. A well-educated man, Benjamin worked hard throughout the war to protect and save the Jews in his area from both the Germans and the Soviets. His life was miraculously spared on numerous occasions.
I will never forget the afternoon I spent with this warm, gentle man. He had a kind face, large eyes, and a mouth prone to wide smiles.
This is his story:
I was born into a family of believers, and I knew the Lord from childhood. My grandparents and parents both taught me strongly to keep the gospel. I was accustomed to look for, and recognize, the will of God.
Right after my father died (in 1932), the horrible famine of the 1930’s began. My mother was left with seven children and herself to feed. It was in these conditions that we lived when the war began. We were always in need – always hungry. We often had only weak soup to eat, but the Lord faithfully kept us through that time and no one died.
In 1937, when I was fifteen, my uncle brought me into the city (Odessa) to live with him. In 1939, I returned to my mother’s village in the northern region of Odessa as a qualified accountant.
The collective farm that my family lived on nominated me to be their bookkeeper when I returned. Though I was only seventeen, I was well-educated and willing to help.
Before he died, my father had a good friend who was a Jew. They often sat in one another’s company and sang hymns together. Early on, our Jewish friend asked the leader of the collective farm to help him build a canteen on his property. When asked why, this Jew replied that a war with Hitler was fast approaching and this canteen would be a hiding place for the Jews.
The leader of the farm agreed to help and for years this canteen was host to many hiding Jews. This was a secret – very few people knew about it. Throughout the war, someone hid inside that canteen everyday.
Because I was the official bookkeeper of the collective farm, it was my duty to issue passports to the villagers. I and the leader of the collective farm both believed in God and we decided to issue all Jews passports in order to help them.
The Soviets frowned upon giving passports to Jews, but without this proper documentation, they were at the mercy of the fascists. The leader and I decided it would be better to save our countrymen by issuing them passports than to submit to the law of the Soviets. By issuing out those passports, we were able to save over three hundred Jews in our region.
When we developed these passports, we always left off the fact that a person was Jewish. Sometimes we had to change a man or a woman’s name from a Jewish name to a Ukrainian name. Now this was very dangerous work, but I always knew that I was following the plan of the Lord and I pressed on without fear.
Three times we were betrayed for doing this work, and each time we were sentenced to be hanged. But the Lord saved us every time, because the Commandant of the German regime who was assigned to our village was a believer in Christ. His mercy saved us, and we continued to help the Jews.
In 1944, the Germans left our village and the Soviet Army came. The Soviets demanded to know how so many people in our village survived the occupation so we gave them the list of names of the people that we had saved. We thought that perhaps we would be commended for our actions, but instead they looked at the list and spoke to us harshly.
For our actions of saving the Jews, the Soviets sent us to a penalty battalion to finish out the war.
We were sent to the front line without any weapons. We were told that the only way we could be redeemed was by our blood. If we were wounded, then our blood would redeem us. If we were killed – our life would redeem us.
So [at the age of 22], I was taken to the front line without protection. Without armor or weapons, we had to get very creative in our battle tactics.
We took empty cans and boxes and cut holes in them so that when we threw them they whistled, sounding like incoming bombs. We frightened the Germans so much that they ran, leaving behind all their weapons and armor. We didn’t have to fire a shot and they all left.
The Lord saved me many times in those years, and by saving me, he saved many other people. Those are only the main important points of my personal history. There are many other stories, but the most important thing to remember is that the Lord saves.
Because I began my service in the Red Army in the penalty battalion, I was never recognized as being a Soviet soldier. But that doesn’t matter to me now. It means nothing to me.
